In our previous blog, we had mentioned Why WordPress is beneficial for SEO Activities. As mentioned in that blog, WordPress default installation is not at all SEO friendly. With the use of some plugins and a little bit of manual work, WordPress becomes SEO friendly.
Right now, you can extend your experience with an option of 51,330+ plugins in WordPress library. Out of this great library, huge percentage of plugins are made with respect to SEO perspective. You can choose from them according to your requirements and can improve your SEO Rankings.
Here is a list of plugins every WordPress site must have to improve SEO. It’s not necessary that you had to install all of these plugins to improve SEO. You can use it according to your preference.
Yoast is one of the most trusted WordPress plugin used to improve SEO Ranking of your website. It is currently active in 3+ million WordPress sites and is compatible with the latest WordPress 4.8.
Yoast can ease your efforts for ON-Page SEO activity.
Yoast is bundled with functionalities as follows
WordPress installation always comes with two pre-installed plugins. One of them is Akismet. Akismet helps your site to get rid of spam. Akismet is fighting against spam since long time by tracking & analyzing the latest spam techniques with its advanced learning algorithm. It ensures the filtration of all spam comments automatically, which results in a spam free website.
Though, Akismet comes with default installation, it is not active by default. You had to activate it manually. After activating the plugin, you had to Signup with your email Id to get the unique Akismet API Key. Once you Insert the Unique API key Akismet start it’s magic and your WordPress website will remain spam free without any further activity.
Mobile internet usage has already surpassed desktop internet usage. The open source project AMP was introduced with a goal to improve the performance of the mobile web. It is essential for any website to have an AMP version for better & faster mobile access. Hence, the usage of AMP is continuously increasing with the time.
The “AMP for WP” plugin developed by Automattic is the most used plugin which creates AMP compatible copy from all pages and displays AMP version in mobile when an AMP version is requested. Right now this plugin is not capable of redirecting a request to AMP page automatically when searched from the mobile devices. This can only be handled by Search Engines.
The speed of a website matters not only with respect to SEO perspective but with end-users too. As we know, images contribute to a large percentage of the total page size. The optimization of the images is a mandatory task if one wants to lower the loading time of the WordPress site. For a smaller website, it is possible to optimize images manually. But for a large WordPress site, optimizing images is a tedious work.
Here comes Smush plugin that helps to optimize and compress your images without losing quality.
Compatible with the latest WordPress 4.8 Version, this award winning plugin has 800,000+ active installs. The most important advantage of Smush is the ability to compress images in bulk with just one click.
“Share Buttons” plugin by +AddThis let the readers to share your website content on social media. This results in increase in number of visits to your websites. With the help of “AddThis” plugin, you can place social sharing button on your content. You can also choose the position of buttons on a website. Plus, there are several style options that let this buttons to sync with your website layout.
Configuring this plugin in your website, you can later analyze the number of shares of your content.
Site speed is an inevitable thing in 2017, and one needs to take every actions to reduce the loading time of a website. Caching is one of the important aspects to reduce website loading time. Reputed sites like Mashable, Matt Cutt’s blog, WpBeginner etc. are using W3 Total Cache Plugin, which indicates the credibility of this plugin. It supports page caching, database caching, browser caching, object caching, CDN integration etc.
All these plugins provide basic functionality in their free version, and there are many alternates of this plugins. You can use them too as per your requirement.
Share your thoughts in the comment section if we had missed any plugin, you think must have to be on this list.
Also, comment your feedback for any of this plugin, if you had used it.
Feel free to ask any question regarding WordPress. Our experienced team will be happy to solve your queries.